Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/659

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 643

not more specifically botanists, physiologists, zoologists, neurolo- gists, etc'

In other words, the outcome of thought about men in asso- ciation amounts to dawning perception that human association is not a mere academic conventionality. It is the objective reality which is the setting for the ultimate human problem of the conduct of life. Knowledge of this reality depends upon organization of the results of a multitude of investigations, many of which have not yet been proposed, and few, if any, of which have been completed. Sociology then, in the large sense, or the organon of knowledge about human associations, is today a vast system of problems concerning the essential elements and cor- relations of human association. This being the case, all the ways and means thus far devised for investigating human asso- ciations have their uses at the proper time and place, but it is evident that the conventional "sciences" are at best rudimentary means for advancing knowledge of association in general. There must be diminishing regard for the lines drawn by " sciences," and increasing attention to the direct import of problems.

For example, it has been said by Herbert Spencer, with prescience far in advance of his science, that "the question of questions for the politician should ever be : 'What type of social structure am I tending to produce ?' "= There is no difference of opinion among social theorists as to the abstract desirability of knowledge about the relation of different sorts of acts to social structure. One at least of the large problems of social science is accordingly this: "How do different sorts of acts affect social structure ? " Now there is no conventional academic " department " or social science to which such a problem belongs. On the contrary, there is no department or science to which it does not belong. It is a real problem, just as truly as the ques- tion of the effect of electrolysis upon steel construction is a real problem. The anthropologist, the psychologist, the ethnologist, the historian, the political economist, the political scientist, and an indefinite number of subsidiary specialists, must necessarily cooperate in the solution of the problem.

■ Vide above, p. 508.

' Social Sialics and Man vs. the State, Am. ed. of 1892, p. 312.